I can see her in the sound 
of the word doily: Mom’s mom,
hand on a crochet hook,
wire-rimmed spectacles perched 
on the bridge of her nose.

And Dad’s mom I conjure too,
whiff of boiled cabbage
putting me back in her kitchen.
Tall Maggie stooping, her gnarly hands 
on a tin of molasses cookies,
to offer me one. Grandpa 
at the table trying to parse out 
the little English he could read 
in the story she’s interrupted to feed me.
Maggie! Then what happened?

Mom sings to me each time
I hear the Andrews Sisters,
and I can imagine Dad 
riding that Farmall-H tractor 
rusting in a field I pass by.

The way my fingers on your skin
bring back the eagerness of my youth.
                        

I believe the Buddha was onto something
2500 years ago sitting under that bodhi tree
just thinking, or rather, trying not to think
until at last, weeks later, he attained enlightenment.

Most days I’d be better off not thinking too.
There are so many things I’d be better off 
not thinking about:

drug company and NRA lobbyists
bribed politicians and the voters that keep electing them
school shootings (Christ, all the school shootings!)
hundred year floods that happen every five years now
endless war
my mortality
our doomed species.
                        

The existence of the soul is not self-evident.
Just ask the young woman staring 
into the vacant eyes of her rapist. 
Ask the grieving mother, at the trial 
of the pedophile who killed her little boy,
what she sees in the defendant’s eyes.

And nothing need be said to the rose
to make it open. It is the nature of a rose 
to open, as roses have always done
without cues.

Here is what is self-evident:
The world exists. We are here.
Despite the pure innocence of each newborn, 
evil exists. We could, but don’t,
choose to change that.